Point-to-GeoBlog

Abstract

People record and share their experiences through text, audio and video. Increasingly they do this blogging from mobile devices. We illustrate a novel, mobile, low interaction cost approach to supporting the creation of a rich record of journeys made and places encountered. By pointing and tilting a mobile, users indicate their interests in a location. No content is provided to the user in situ but, later, web materials including images, entries from other people's blogs and web pages are automatically placed on an interactive map for viewing on a larger screen device. We built two mobile prototypes to explore the approach -- one combines gestures and visual map feedback; the other is more lightweight, allowing the user to simply point-and-tilt. We describe and motivate the approaches and present user studies that raise issues relevant to their design and to the wider class of device and service concerned with mobile spatial information access.